In her book,Teaching Techniques in Teaching Writing, Dr. Ann Raimes writes, When we learn a second language, we learn to communicate with other people: to understand them, talk to them, read what they have written and write to them, (Raimes, Ann, Teaching Techniques in Teaching Writing. Oxford. Oxford American English, l983, page Preface, viii.). She goes on to say that, an integral part of participating fully in a new cultural setting is learning how to communicate when the other person is not directly in front of us, listening to our words, and looking at our gestures and facial expressions, (p. viii). She lists as examples, situations in which a student of ESL may need to write, a note to the mailman, fill out a customer s declaration form, give written instructions, or write a thank you letter, (p. l). She explains that the fact that people frequently have to communicate with each other in writing is not the only reason to include writing as a part of our second-language syllabus. There is an additional important reason: writing helps our students learn, (p. l).
It is a known fact that writing facts down in a History class helps students memorize dates and places of important people and events. It is also a known fact amongst scholars in the field of education, that what people write (particularly with a pen or pencil) reinforces anything that they are learning. Raimes states, writing reinforces the grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary that we have been teaching our students, (p. l). She also states that when our students write, they become necessarily involved in new language because they are highly motivated to find a specific word that holds the perfect meaning. She also notes that there is a very close relationship between the thinking process and the writing process. Professor Ann Raimes says a good deal of writing that goes on in ESL lessons is sentence writing, (. 4). She says that her book is predominately about concentrating on techniques to get students to go beyond sentence exercises so that they can write to: l) communicate with a reader; 2) express ideas without the pressure of face to face communication; 3) to explore a subject; 4) to record experience; and 5) to become familiar with the conventions of written language discourse, (Ann Raimes, Techniques in Teaching Writing. Oxford American English, l983). Learning how to write is simply NOT a natural extension of learning how to speak. Many adult native speakers of a language find writing a difficult task!, (p. 4).
Raimes cites some pedagogical implications of some of the differences she notices between spoken and written communication. For one, she states unequivocally, there is no one answer to the question of how to teach writing in ESL classes, (p. 5). She then goes on to elucidate in her article the primary theoretical approaches to the teaching of writing in the ESL classroom. She outlines the controlled approach which emphasizes accuracy rather than fluency; the free-writing method which emphasizes fluency rather than accuracy; the Grammar-Syntax-Writing Approach which relies on the belief that writing cannot be seen as composed of separate skills which are learned one by one, but rather on a design, a process. The designing of lesson plans within this process is imperative and sequential. For example, the students may be asked to write instructions for cooking a pie that need to be done in a specific sequential order. Within her book, Raimes illustrates many lesson plans that represent each of these approaches. Despite the fact that her textbook was not written recently, it still stands as one of the most clearly written and important books around for the teaching of writing in the ESL classroom. I used many of her ideas when designing the lesson plans for English 559.
Another excellent textbook for guidance in the teaching of writing in the ESL classroom is Ronald W. White s New Ways in Teaching Writing. Within the introduction, White stipulates that the ability to speak a foreign language has become a more highly-rated skill than being able to write in that same language. Even so, writing in a foreign language such as English still remains an important requirement for many learners especially given the role of English in International communication and commerce, (White, Ronald W. New Ways in Teaching Writing. Pub. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. copywrite, l995).
Writing is perceived by these authors as a skill which is imperative in the evolving world of international commerce and information trading. Writing can be viewed as involving a number of thinking processes which are drawn upon in varied and complex ways as an individual composes, transcribes, evaluates and revises. Ferris and Hedgcock in Chapter Six of their Teaching ESL Composition outline the benefits of utilizing the techniques of peer revision and peer review in ESL writing instruction classes. They note that the affective filter of the students can be lowered by this technique because it allows the anxious student to clean up his/her mistakes before turning in a paper for the feared instructor. As well, it can be assumed that the basic level of writing will be somewhat similar, at least more equal, than the writing levels when the student is compared with the teacher. Peer-revision, then, enables students to feel less intimidated. They are being corrected by people who know about as much about the writing process as themselves.
In the book, New Ways in Teaching Writing, edited by Ronald W. White, there is a clarity in the way it is organized. It is divided into four parts which are respectively: Part I The Writing Process; Part II Academic Writing: from paragraph to essay; Part III, Expressive Writing: Creative and Personal; Part IV Personal Business Correspondence: Writing in the New World, (White, p. 3). This book is excellently written, clear and focused. It s premise is that clear instruction and good modeling behavior on the part of the teacher can elicit much success in the area of the teaching of writing to ESL students. All of the familiar types of writing are discussed: narrative, descriptive, discursive, argumentative, and comparative prose. This author highly recommends both the Ferris and Hedgcock book in conjunction with the White and Raimes books. The Ferris and Hedgcock book is not as clear, or do the authors come out for one position or the other.
B. Susser in the article, Process Approaches in ESL/EFL Writing Instruction, l994, says that a wide use of modalities needs to be used in the construction of lesson plans for the ESL and EFL classrooms. James Coady, in his Research on ESL/EFL Vocabulaty Acquisition: Putting It in Context, from Second Language Reading and Vocabulary Learning, surveys the recent research of L2 vocabulary acquisition in the context of reading. The focus of this synthesis paper is on vocabulary acquisition as it relates to improved writing skills, but some of the ideas presented in Coady s chapter are relevant to our discussion. One of the relevant issues discussed in his paper is the issue of how words are stored. A long-standing pedagogical question concerns whether a foreign language should be taught in conjunction with the native language or not, such as through translation and dual language texts. Many researchers have felt that a significant clue to the answer depends upon whether the vocabulary of two different languages is totally separate in the mind or interlinked in some manner, (p. l4). The question has mplications for the writing instruction that goes on in a classroom. The answers to such a question clearly has implications that could impact a student s writing, because clearly it impacts the issue of vocabulary, hich is inextricably tied to that of writing.
Research findings have shown that the words in the L2 are less well organized and less easily accessible than those of L1. This finding would clearly have implications when students are doing written work They may, for example, turn in papers which have phrases or chunks of L1 and L2 language interspersed within their paper. When reviewing this article, I drew some clear implications for the writing classroom even though the article had more to do with reading. The components of teaching in the ESL classroom are all intertwined. This is what comes out of most of the research articles that have been read and synthesized for this paper. In order for one to be a student-centered teacher who is compassionate and serious about creating a true learning environment for one s students, one must employ a number of approaches in the teaching of vocabulary so as to reach each type of learner. It is imperative to understand the differences in the skills of writing, speaking and listening when teaching in the ESL classroom because these skills each require their own separate, carefully designed activities, that when should be built into a context-based thematic unit for presentation.
References
Coady, James. Second language Reading and Vocabulary Learning. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, (l993), Chapter 1 Research on ESL/EFL Vocabulary Acquisition: Putting It in Context,
Hughes, Rebecca, Mc Carthy, Michael, From Sentence to Discourse: Discourse Grammar and English Language Teaching, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 3. No. 2, Summer, l998.
Raimes, Anne Teaching Techniques in Teaching Writing. Oxford American English, l983.
Raimes, Anne. Out of the Woods: Emerging traditions in the teaching of writing, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 25, 407-430.
Stoller, Fredricka L. and Grabe, William. Second Language Reading and Vocabulary Learning. Implications for L2 Vocabulary Acquisition and Instruction from L1 Vocabulary Research, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, l993.
Susser, B. Process Approaches in ESL/EFL Writing Instruction. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 27, pp. 657-677.
White, Ronald W. Editor, New Ways in Teaching Writing. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc., l995).